Lorca in New York

If you're like me, you probably associate the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca
(1898-1936) with
bucolic dramas like Blood Wedding and poetry of the countryside resonating with
mythic nature imagery. So I was a bit surprised to learn that he had written a book of poems
while living in New York from June 1929 to March 1930. However, I was not surprised to know
that Lorca didn't think much of New York at all. In addition to feeling a bit lost in the
urban sprawl, he was saddened by the class divisions and racism, and though he made many
close friends and was welcomed in intellectual circles he experienced the sense of isolation
common to urban dwellers.

The five poems below are
some of my favorites from the collection Poeta en Nueva York.
Both "Landscape with Two Tombs and an Assyrian Dog" and "Ruin" were written while the
poet was staying in Vermont and employ some of Lorca's familiar nature imagery, though
with a particular ferocity that hums with the presence of death.
The short poem "Murder" documents an overheard dialogue and punctuates
it with poetic comment.
The book contains several long poems that try to contain the maddening, epic
chaos of the city, among them
"Blind Panorama of New York."
Finally, "The Dawn" captures a New York morning like all New York mornings with fine surreal
embellishments that heighten the reality of the moment.
If you enjoy these, I highly
recommend you pick up a copy of the book. The edition put out by Noonday Press
in 1998 translated by Greg Simon and Steven F. White includes a host of letters that give a
complete picture of Lorca's time in New York. Naturally, all of the translations
on this page are my own.

Landscape with Two Tombs and an Assyrian Dog

Friend:
get up and hear the howl
of the Assyrian dog.
The three nymphs of Cancer have been dancing,
my son.
They brought mountains of red sealing wax
and rough bed sheets where cancer slept.
The horse had an eye in its neck
and the moon was in a sky so cold
that it had to tear open its mound of Venus
and drown the old cemeteries in blood and ash.

Friend,
Wake up, the mountains still aren’t breathing
and the grass of my heart is elsewhere.
It doesn’t matter that you are full of sea water.
I loved a boy for a long time
who kept a little feather on his tongue
and we lived a hundred years inside a knife.
Wake up. Be quiet. Listen. Sit up a little.
The howl
is a long purple tongue that leaves
fearful ants and liquor of irises.
Now it approaches the rock. Don’t stretch your roots!
Come closer. Groan. Don’t sob in your dreams, friend.

Murder
(Two early morning voices on Riverside Drive)

“How did it happen?”
“A cut on the cheek.”
That’s all!
A nail that presses the stem.
A pin that dives in
until it finds the roots of the scream.
And the sea stops moving.“How did it happen?”
“Just like that.”“Stop it! Like that?”
“Yes.”
The heart came out on its own.“Oh my!”

Blind Panorama of New York

If it is not the birds
covered with ash,
if it is not groans that beat on the windows during the wedding,
it will be the delicate creatures of the air
that flow with new blood in perpetual darkness.
But no, it is not the birds.
Because the birds will soon become oxen.
With the moon’s help they can become white rocks
and are always wounded boys
before the judges lift the cloth.

All know of the sorrow intertwined with death,
but true sorrow is not found in the spirit.
Nor in the air, nor in our lives,
nor in terraces teeming with smoke.
True sorrow that keeps things awake
is a tiny but incessant burn
in the innocent eyes of other systems.

An abandoned suit weighs so much on men
that sometimes the sky groups them into unruly mobs;
and those who die giving birth know in the final hour
that all rumor will be stone and all tracks beaten.
We do not recognize that thought has ghettoes
where the philosopher is devoured by Chinese and caterpillars
and some foolish children in kitchens found
little swallows with crutches
who knew how to speak the word love.

No, it is not the birds.
It is not a bird that expresses the crowd frenzy of a lake,
or the urge for murder that presses on us at each moment,
or the metallic hum of suicide that revives us at each dawn.
It is a capsule of air where the whole world pains us,
it is a small bright space in the mad unity of the light,
an indefinable ladder where clouds and roses forget,
the Chinese clamor that bustles in the disembarking of the blood.
I lost myself many times
searching for the burn that keeps things awake
and I only found sailors cast onto the railings
and little creatures of the sky buried under the snow.
But true sorrow was in other places
where crystallized fish were dying in trunks;
places for ancient untouched statues under foreign skies
and for the tender intimacy of volcanoes.

There is no sorrow in the voice. Only teeth exist,
but the teeth will stay quiet, isolated by black satin.
There is no sorrow in the voice. Here only the earth exists.
The earth with its timeless gates
that lead to the blush of fruit.

The Dawn

The New York dawn has
four columns of mud
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in fetid waters.
The New York dawn groans
along vast stairs
searching between the edges
for spikenards of sketched anguish.
The dawn arrives and nobody receives it in the mouth
because tomorrow and hope are not possible there:
sometimes furious swarms of coins
drill and devour abandoned children.
The first to get out know in their bones:
they know they are headed into the mud of numbers and laws,
to artless games, to fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noise
in a shameless challenge of rootless science.
Through the boroughs people hesitate sleepless
as if they have emerged from a shipwreck of blood.